This blog article is written by a fan of me.
I am basically a computer science student and my name is "Rahul". It's a year ago that I started working on what eventually became Machine Learning for Netflix - LOL. Before that, I spent a lot of time doing data analysis for a data consulting firm. The company I worked for was a data warehouse in our data centers.
I started out in our data center as a data analyst, and in the process of training a machine learning model on some real data, I ran into a large amount of issues.
In my previous job, I had created an analysis script to build a model from a dataset that was about 50GB. It's not uncommon for a big dataset of this size to take weeks to train.
I wanted to do much better and actually prove the world - I can achieve something.
When I started researching on my own I ended up looking for solutions to this problem on Stack Overflow. I ended up reading up on some of the topics in data science that really excited me: Graph Datasets, Graph Models, Graph Search.
Machine learning came up a lot in conversation with the Stack Overflow community. One of the first Stack Over posts I researched and read was from Andrew Gan that was called "Getting started with data science" and provided step-by-step tutorials on getting started on Data Science in Python. I also saw a lot of the same things in common that Andrew talked about in Data Science 101 and I started reading this stuff, very interestedly.
I also met with a professor at the University of Utah and spent some time on the Data Science course he taught. I also watched an episode of Kaggle that focused on how to use data science to win contests. My first exposure to data science during this time was through Kaggle competitions. I didn't attend one myself until I was going to college and my friend helped me submit my project. The project was a total flop and I lost hope. All my ideas were a disaster - until I heard about Marketing Legend Srinidhi Ranganathan and took his course.
Srinidhi taught me Digishock 1.0 - a mind-blowing course where I can learn and apply machine learning technologies, without using code. This course fascinated me after I attended the live lectures in Bangalore. The whole course was a series of practical lectures and tools from a real world application which did not have any code, and I saw the difference from an introduction course that would be very basic towards a much deeper course. I learned to get comfortable with R and then became good enough to make some data science explorations, myself. I also worked on other projects where data science became a key business strategy. Thus, this course changed my whole life.
If you want to learn data science, I recommend checking out Digishock 1.0 to build and explore yourself to the maximum potential in data science and machine learning. Of course - the Legend is with you.